Today is remarkable as an extraordinary paper for me on the San Bushman arrow poison beetles was finally published. The idea of this research was sparked in the back of a lecture room, at the annual meeting of the Entomological Society of America. Two colleagues asked about the leaf beetles supposedly used by African bushmen. It was a tiny but stunning infection. I spent the next six months completely engrossed, trying to track down what was known. And, like a series of trap doors, I fell deeper and deeper with no turning back. It took a long time to get at the nub of the story, but it was so worth it to bring clarity and light to this fuzzy question, and to lay out a new research program on a strange clade of leaf beetles, the Blepharida-group flea beetles. I have such gratitude to so many people……my field partners in South Africa, Botswana and Namibia, to the San communities we visited, to my husband Fernando, to my funders at AMNH, UC-Berkeley, and the American Philosophical Society, to my partners at museums in Windhoek and Pretoria, and to my coauthors in Anthropology and Botany. More is to come in this research, but I want to enjoy this moment of achievement in bringing this comprehensive and synthetic work to a journal near you.
Reading:
Chaboo, C.S., M. Biesele, R.K. Hitchcock, A. Weeks. 2016. Beetles and plant arrow poisons of the Ju|hoan and Hai||om San peoples of Namibia (Insecta, Coleoptera, Chrysomelidae; Plantae, Anacardiaceae, Apocynaceae, Burseraceae). ZooKeys 558: 9–54. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.558.5957.
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